LEADING people at the centre of the three Blair governments have published their memoirs for big cash payments, knowing full well that their ‘revelations’ will be used by the Tory party to try to return to government and smash the Labour Party.
In his memoirs, ex-deputy premier Prescott reveals that Blair and Brown were the joint architects of ‘new’ Labour with Brown initially the leading figure.
Their opportunist politics were part of an equally opportunist cut-throat competition between the two for the premiership which began in 1994 and is still being fought out today.
Prescott says he urged Blair to sack Brown at the height of their frequent rows – but the former prime minister was ‘scared’ of his chancellor.
Prescott says: ‘Tony knew that sacking Gordon would tear the party apart.’ He adds: ‘I also think Tony was scared of Gordon.’
Prescott says he also urged Brown to resign and fight Blair from the back benches, but Brown would not do that, fearing the consequences.
It emerges that Blair was ready to resign before the 2005 general election, because of the crisis over the Iraq war, but was persuaded to stay on, out of a fear that proved to be wrong that Brown would not continue with his policies.
Prescott reveals that Blair reneged several times on promises to make way for Brown at No 10.
Prescott says of Blair’s character: ‘Tony has a habit of saying things people want to hear.’
He recalls how he arranged ‘hundreds’ of reconciliation meetings and telephone calls between them.
He said meetings had to be abandoned because Brown was ‘frustrating, annoying, bewildering and prickly’.
Prescott also says he called Blair ‘a little shit’ during one particularly explosive row, after feeling he was being snubbed in favour of Blair’s ‘college boys’ coterie’ of advisers in 1994.
On another occasion he says he accused Blair of using him, adding, ‘And I called him a bloody Tory. He’d just laugh.’
He also reveals that he vetoed Blair’s wish to bring Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown into the cabinet in 1997.
Prescott was the regime’s ‘fixer’ in its relations with the trade unions, and in the relationship between the two opportunists leading ‘new’ Labour, Brown and Blair.
Prescott says that Brown deliberately held back Treasury funding from Blair’s flagship projects so that he would have more to spend when he finally took over as prime minister.
Prescott accuses Cherie Blair of thinking that the ‘longer Gordon suffered, the better’.
In her autobiography, Cherie Blair reveals that ‘in April 2004 with Gordon rattling the keys above his head, Tony suffered a crisis of confidence’ but she ‘remained determined that Tony was not going to resign’.
She reveals that her number one concern is cash.
Brown at the first cabinet meeting in 1997 ‘announced he was not going to take the salary increase and he put pressure on the others not to accept it either’.
She adds: ‘All my calculations were based on that increase.’
She added: ‘How dare Gordon do that? He was a batchelor living on his own in a flat with a small mortgage.’ Now 11 years later Blair is about to acquire her sixth dwelling place.
Blair’s former fund-raiser Lord Levy told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show yesterday that Premier Brown knew about the loans involved in the ‘cash-for-honours’ scandal.
He said: ‘It would be inconceivable that he really didn’t know what was going on.’
Last month, he said Blair had told him he did not think Brown could defeat Tory leader Cameron in the next general election.